*Cough*… We are Bringing It Back Onshore

IT in the UK has a once‑in‑a‑generation chance to stop being the department of “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” and start being the group that quietly keeps the country in business when the world goes sideways. Right now, many are still worshipping at the wrong altars: office days, AI decks, and offshoring business cases that age about as well as warm milk.

If you can’t explain your tech strategy in terms of outcomes a customer or CFO would care about, you don’t have a strategy. You have nothing.

The wrong scoreboard

Somewhere, in a very shiny office, a CIO is still proudly reporting:

·       Days in office per FTE

·       Number of AI pilots “in flight”

·       Tickets closed per sprint

If you squint, it looks like progress. If you’re a customer, it looks like absolutely nothing.

Let’s be honest:

·       “Three days a week in the office” is a commute metric.

·       “AI initiative” is a buzzword density metric.

·       “Tickets closed” is a busywork metric.

They’re not evil; they’re just the corporate equivalent of counting how many times you went to the gym instead of whether you can now walk up the stairs without seeing God.

Meanwhile, the scoreboards that actually matter (renewals, margin, risk, time‑to‑market, customer satisfaction) are politely parked in someone else’s slide deck. IT is busy proving it exists, not proving it delivers.

Swap this:

·       “Office days” and “tickets closed”

For this:

·       “Churn down 2%.”

·       “Time‑to‑value for feature X cut from 6 weeks to 2.”

If it doesn’t move a business outcome, it’s not worth the slide it’s printed on.

IT leaders getting a grip

If that sounds harsh, I’m not throwing stones from the outside. I have personally:

·       Presented a dashboard of 47 metrics that did not contain a single outcome the CEO actually cared about.

·       Described a project as “strategic” purely because it had a nice logo and a workstream lead.

·       Nodded gravely at an “AI roadmap” I knew in my soul was a PowerPoint mood board.

It is so much easier to talk about:

·       “Resource utilisation” than “Did we actually improve anything?”

·       “Velocity” than “Did the customer notice?”

·       “Innovation” than “What would we be comfortable killing because it isn’t working?”

We end up as curators of a Great Dashboard of Things That Don’t Matter, then act surprised when nobody invites us into the conversation about real business strategy.

Getting a grip on what matters now means a few brutally simple things:

·       Name outcomes in plain language. “Shorter claims cycles.” “Higher renewal rate.” “Less money lost to fraud.” If you need a glossary, it’s probably not an outcome.

·       Chain the work to those outcomes. If a programme can’t say which outcome it moves and how you’ll know, it’s not ready; it’s just an idea with a budget.

·       Refuse cosmetic trends. If “AI”, “hybrid working” or “global delivery” are on slide one and “impact” doesn’t show up until later, you’re doing optics, not leadership.

If you’re a CIO reading this, you need a red pen and the nerve to cross out every metric on your dashboard a customer would never ask you about.

Outcomes, not office days

Somehow, we drifted into a world where “getting people back into the office” became a proxy for digital strategy, as if the Wi‑Fi signal gets stronger when everyone is on the same floor.

Being in a building is not a strategy. It’s a logistics choice.

You can have:

·       A buzzing office

·       A thick roadmap

·       A weekly all‑hands

…and absolutely no meaningful progress on anything customers or shareholders care about.

Two questions are usually enough:

·       If we stopped measuring office attendance tomorrow, would any customer notice?

·       If we stopped working on this outcome tomorrow, who would scream?

If the only people who scream are internal, you’re optimising for comfort, not value.

Outcomes, not AI mood boards

Then there’s AI.

You can’t move without tripping over an AI vision deck at the moment. Some teams have shipped more slideware about AI than actual working features. I say this with love and the slightly haunted look.

Here’s a simple test:

·       If you replaced the word “AI” with “spreadsheet” and your strategy still basically makes sense, you don’t have an AI strategy; you have an automation wish‑list in a more fashionable font.

Swap this:

·       “Number of AI pilots started.”

For this:

·       “Hero KPI moved by X% because of AI.”

·       “£Y cost avoided / revenue gained from AI in production.”

The only AI conversations that matter are the ones anchored in outcomes:

·       “We reduced fraud losses by 20%.”

·       “We cut customer onboarding time from 10 days to 2.”

·       “We freed up 30% of specialist time for higher‑value work.”

Everything else is mood music with a transformer logo.

The dirty secret of offshoring

Now, the open secret everyone pretends not to see: offshoring.

For the last twenty years, a big chunk of IT strategy could be summarised as:
“We will do the same things, but cheaper, by asking people further away to do them.”

The pitch‑deck version:

·       “Global delivery model.”

·       “Follow‑the‑sun productivity.”

·       “Access to worldwide talent.”

The lived‑experience version:

·       Three stand‑ups, two handover calls, and one “quick clarification” thread that lasts four days.

·       A Jira ticket that crosses more borders than your average backpacker.

·       A “global” team where nobody is awake at the same time as the product owner.

Offshoring itself isn’t the villain. The villain is the story we sold ourselves: that you could squeeze the rate card and magically retain the same speed, quality, and alignment.

We optimised for:

·       Day rates

·       Headcount multipliers

·       PowerPoint maps with lots of impressive dots

We rarely optimised for:

·       Cycle time

·       First‑time‑right

·       Cost of confusion and rework

All of that gets buried in “one‑off issues” and “communication challenges” until the hidden cost quietly eats the saving and then some. Everyone knows this. Everyone also knows the spreadsheet will still get approved next year, because nobody wants to be the one who says, “This is a false economy.”

And then comes the five‑year ritual.

The original deal is signed. There are town halls, maps with arrows, words like “synergy” and “follow‑the‑sun.” Time passes. Not much actually lands. Quality is “mixed.” The business is quietly furious.

Five years later, a new leader appears at the front of the room with a familiar slide:
“After a comprehensive review of our global delivery model…”
Small pause. Slight cough. Everyone leans in.
“…we’ve decided the best way to deliver value is to bring this capability back onshore.”

The room does that awkward laugh people do when the punchline is “we all wasted half a decade.” The re‑shoring gets branded as a bold new direction. Nobody says out loud what everyone is thinking: this is just the same work, boomeranged, with nothing much to show in the middle except a very long email trail.

Meanwhile, in the UK, we quietly make ourselves dependent on capabilities, infrastructure, and jurisdictions we don’t control, and then act surprised when geopolitics decides to play Jenga with our supply chains. It’s a bit like outsourcing your entire memory to an ex and hoping the breakup goes well.

If your offshore model can’t show better end‑to‑end cycle time, quality and resilience (not just cheaper days) it’s not a strategy. It’s an accounting trick with a travel budget.

UK context: cheaper vs safer vs smarter

Right now, UK businesses are dealing with sanctions, regulatory change, supply‑chain fragility, and a general sense that “stable” is something that happens to other countries. In that world, the question isn’t just “Can we do it cheaper?” It’s:

·       Can we keep operating when something breaks somewhere we can’t control?

·       Do we own enough critical knowledge and capability here to adapt quickly?

·       Are we building UK businesses that can survive more than one kind of shock?

If your delivery model assumes:

·       The same locations will always be accessible

·       The same partners will always be politically acceptable

·       The same infrastructure will always be available on the same terms

…you don’t have a strategy. You have a beautifully formatted hope.

This isn’t about being anti‑offshore or anti‑global. It’s about being anti‑fantasy. Cost is one dimension of value. So are resilience, speed, quality, and sovereignty. Pretending otherwise is how we end up “saving” 20% on day rates while losing months in handoffs and years in optionality.

From vendor of effort to partner in outcomes

For decades, tech has learned to talk to “the business” in a certain way: projects, features, tickets, SLAs. It’s a transactional model: you ask, we deliver, someone ticks a box.

That model isn’t just creaking; in this environment, it’s dangerous.

The conversation we actually need sounds more like:

“We’ll work with you to define the outcomes that matter most in this climate (growth, resilience, optionality) and then shape technology, process, location strategy, and people around those outcomes. Judge us on that, not on how many change requests we opened or how many stand‑ups we ran.”

That shift (from vendor of effort to partner in outcomes) is how IT becomes a strategic asset for UK businesses rather than a line item everyone resents until something breaks.

If it doesn’t move a business outcome, it doesn’t matter. That’s the line.

One last confession

Part of the reason I care about this is that I’m building in this space myself. I’m working on a product born from watching, up close, the chaos that happens when teams track everything except the value they’re supposed to create, and when offshoring, AI and office days are treated as strategies instead of tactics.

I’ve played the “more for less” offshore card. I’ve ridden the AI hype. I’ve presented the dashboards of nonsense. I am absolutely part of the problem I’m describing.

Maybe that’s the qualification, not the disqualifier.

The UK tech industry doesn’t need more immaculate thought leaders explaining from a safe distance why everyone else is doing it wrong. It needs people in the mess, admitting where the current scoreboards and stories are broken, and insisting, calmly, stubbornly, and with a sense of humour…. that IT leadership grows into its real job.

Not counting seats.
Not chasing trends.
Not pretending offshoring magically fixes everything.

Owning outcomes.

Kyle Maiden
Director – ProjIQ Ltd